doesn’t need to be big or fancy or super detailed, but have some sort of dungeon ready for the players. One huge mistake that a lot of DMs are making nowadays is that don’t actually do this, believe it or not lol. They think the game is “talking” and dragons with maybe one uninspiring fight at some point.
doesn’t need to be big or fancy or super detailed, but have some sort of dungeon ready for the players. One huge mistake that a lot of DMs are making nowadays is that don’t actually do this, believe it or not lol. They think the game is “talking” and dragons with maybe one uninspiring fight at some point.
A thread where a new DM asking for tips about how to run their first game is not a place to cynically give your subjective opinion about what you perceive as "issues" in games run at tables that you don't play in, and will never play in.
You can have excellent combat encounters without ever stepping foot in a dungeon. I love to run my players through a dungeon, but sass posting like this is hardly helpful.
It's not yet been said, but a solid session 0 is highly recommended, where you can flesh out ANY details or mechanics there may be some issue with. It also allows you as a DM to let the players know, openly that you do NOT, in fact, have ALL the "right" answers just sitting there, so there will be times you make a call, then may change how that same situation works, if you determine you were wrong, or you think the call, in retrospect, was the wrong one.
Few folks have pointed out though, that the most important bit is to have fun. As mentioned, using the "Rule of Cool" sometimes makes the adventure more fun, so long as it isn't too overpowering, or underpowered, depending on the situation. Not bogging down on a weird situation is big, which is why the "wing it" suggestion is a good one. I would also note that any time I make a call on the fly, because digging up the exact, right answer would bog down the game, I tell the players as much and that this ruling MAY change in the futire. (I make a note, to review later and if I am changing it, I inform them at the start of the next session)
Good luck!
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Talk to your Players.Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
It's not yet been said, but a solid session 0 is highly recommended, where you can flesh out ANY details or mechanics there may be some issue with. It also allows you as a DM to let the players know, openly that you do NOT, in fact, have ALL the "right" answers just sitting there, so there will be times you make a call, then may change how that same situation works, if you determine you were wrong, or you think the call, in retrospect, was the wrong one.
Few folks have pointed out though, that the most important bit is to have fun. As mentioned, using the "Rule of Cool" sometimes makes the adventure more fun, so long as it isn't too overpowering, or underpowered, depending on the situation. Not bogging down on a weird situation is big, which is why the "wing it" suggestion is a good one. I would also note that any time I make a call on the fly, because digging up the exact, right answer would bog down the game, I tell the players as much and that this ruling MAY change in the futire. (I make a note, to review later and if I am changing it, I inform them at the start of the next session)
Good luck!
I've been a player for awhile and have DM'd some fun little one-shots, and I can agree with all of this. If you're planning some grand, months-long game, I would strongly recommend writing some sort of "script" first: outline the key events first, then connect the dots with dungeons, puzzles, and NPC interactions. Determine the loot the party will find, when they level up, and gets names for NPCs and places figured out.
However, if you're just having a quick one-shot, I'd use some adventure from the official books and add your own little twists and changes to it. Random encounter tables for sea or long land journeys can spice things up, break up some boring down time, and offer the chance for antics and loot. Through some wild magic in there, have a dragon swoop down and save the party for no reason if they're about to die, have them find a chest with 1,000 oops stones in there, just go crazy and keep it fun. I've fudged tons of damage rolls that would've wiped a party just to keep the momentum going. If you can imagine it, you can put it in your game.
I'm about to DM my first game using DND beyond and my own version of "Frozen Sick". The Encounter Builder is fantastic in determining encounter balancing. You can double this up with a map tool like roll20 to make it more digitally interactive, or simply just print out the maps that are available on DND Beyond already.
Hope this helps. Just have fun and let us know what happens!
I'm about to DM my first game using DND beyond and my own version of "Frozen Sick". The Encounter Builder is fantastic in determining encounter balancing. You can double this up with a map tool like roll20 to make it more digitally interactive, or simply just print out the maps that are available on DND Beyond already.
Hope this helps. Just have fun and let us know what happens!
Note that the encounter builder's recommendations for difficulty level work fairly well at levels 1-3 but don't work all that well after level 4. If the characters are level 5+ then anything short of Deadly is such a cake walk as to not be worth taking the time to roll initiative. For example, my party of 4 level 10 characters are supposed to have a Hard encounter against 3 x trolls. My level 10s would destroy that encounter in under 2 turns taking negligible, if any, damage. When they were level 9, a CR 9 Treant died in the first turn of combat without raising its arms, and a level 10 party is more than capable of taking on a CR22 Lich.
I'm about to DM my first game using DND beyond and my own version of "Frozen Sick". The Encounter Builder is fantastic in determining encounter balancing. You can double this up with a map tool like roll20 to make it more digitally interactive, or simply just print out the maps that are available on DND Beyond already.
Hope this helps. Just have fun and let us know what happens!
Note that the encounter builder's recommendations for difficulty level work fairly well at levels 1-3 but don't work all that well after level 4. If the characters are level 5+ then anything short of Deadly is such a cake walk as to not be worth taking the time to roll initiative. For example, my party of 4 level 10 characters are supposed to have a Hard encounter against 3 x trolls. My level 10s would destroy that encounter in under 2 turns taking negligible, if any, damage. When they were level 9, a CR 9 Treant died in the first turn of combat without raising its arms, and a level 10 party is more than capable of taking on a CR22 Lich.
lol! Thank you for the advice. I ran a few encounters for myself and yeah.. it gets a little broken. This is just a quick game with some people visiting, so even if they wipe a group of knolls out in one round, it adds to the flavor of the game.
There has been a lot of good advice offered so I won’t reiterate it. But one piece of not so good advices needs to be addressed “Always roll dice in the open.”
Don’t roll your dice in the open for you first time, or your first 10 times. If after you have been DM/GMing for a while and decide that is how you want to operate that is fine(DM preference, and there are lots of arguments on both sides). Rolling the dice in the open completely removes 90% of your ability to actually run the mechanical side game as the DM/GM, and create a fantastic story for your players, which is your job. Instead you are just trusting fate, especially if you don’t have a lot of practices scaling encounters/ running a high power BB.
Example: The party faces off against BB, BB roles really good, does massive damage to the entire party, nothing you can do because everyone saw the dice results. A few rounds later BB does the same again, TPK. If you are rolling in the open you do not have any flexibility…. BB roles max damage on a high level AOE attack. If you rolled it behind the screen you can make some of those 6s, 1s and not TPK.
I personally always role behind the screen, and I only manipulate dice rolls in the players favor never against them.
For your first time DM/GMing roll behind the screen, it will help you keep the game moving in the right direction. latter if you feel you want to do it the other way give it a try.
There has been a lot of good advice offered so I won’t reiterate it. But one piece of not so good advices needs to be addressed “Always roll dice in the open.”
Don’t roll your dice in the open for you first time, or your first 10 times. If after you have been DM/GMing for a while and decide that is how you want to operate that is fine(DM preference, and there are lots of arguments on both sides). Rolling the dice in the open completely removes 90% of your ability to actually run the mechanical side game as the DM/GM, and create a fantastic story for your players, which is your job. Instead you are just trusting fate, especially if you don’t have a lot of practices scaling encounters/ running a high power BB.
Example: The party faces off against BB, BB roles really good, does massive damage to the entire party, nothing you can do because everyone saw the dice results. A few rounds later BB does the same again, TPK. If you are rolling in the open you do not have any flexibility…. BB roles max damage on a high level AOE attack. If you rolled it behind the screen you can make some of those 6s, 1s and not TPK.
I personally always role behind the screen, and I only manipulate dice rolls in the players favor never against them.
For your first time DM/GMing roll behind the screen, it will help you keep the game moving in the right direction. latter if you feel you want to do it the other way give it a try.
Teaching someone new to fudge their dice rolls so that they can achieve a desired outcome is pretty far from the greatest advice ever.
The dice roll is the random, objective arbiter of the game and needs be respected by the entire table, especially the DM. If the leader of the game, the DM, can't be trusted to be honest and transparent about dice rolls and their outcome, the players cannot be expected to do the same. Removing the outcome of the roll, no matter how slight it may seem, is the DM forcing the outcome of an encounter to suit their needs or wants. The concept of fudging dice rolls borders on railroading. Rolling those dice in the open prevents the question of whether or not the DM is being objective in their adjudications, it is an excercise in transparency. And yes, it does mean that the monsters that the DM has chosen might kill a PC or five. I don't think fair to blame the DM for killing a PC that the player put into a situation that it might die. That was the player's choice, their agency. Stand by it. Leave the roll up to fate, and the player choices up to the player. Allow for consequence to happen, both good and bad.
You cite being heavy-handed or inexperienced at encounter building as a reason to fudge rolls to prevent character death. Why is it only the DM that is expected to keep a PC alive? Regardless, not all things are accounted for when designing encounters. Specifically the players' actions. We can formulate a rough guess-timate about how a person *might* choose to act during a combat encounter, or even leading up to, but we cannot know the outcome of that encounter beforehand without having some otherworldly knowledge, or railroading.
In your post, you state that you only ever manipulate the dice rolls in your players' favor and never against them. I trust that you are telling the truth, but there is no real way to verify that statement. Everyone has to believe that you're being an honest broker. If your players were to put up a screen and roll dice behind it, would you allow it or would there be a discussion about transparency and trust? When playing online, do you allow physical dice or require that everyone use a digital roller with a public outcome? I might not suggest the "good for me, not for thee" approach.
I will agree that using a DM screen does have advantages in quick reference material and charts. Additionally, some people are more comfortable behind a physical barrier that helps shield them from the public audience they are speaking to. Much like being behind a lectern or podium when public speaking. These are reasons for someone to use a DM screen, not so that they might obfuscate results to alter outcomes.
Also, I have to push back at the concept that the DM is creating a story for the players. Novelists and journalists create stories for an audience. DMs create a structure for a story to unfold in, the players provide the story. A DM might narrate a story to the players, but the players choose the action, direction and detail that gets narrated. They effectively write the story for the DM to describe.
@ OP, regardless of your choice to use a DM screen or not, or your choice to fudge your dice rolls or not, your task is to provide challenges for your PCs to overcome. I would highly recommend preserving as much of the feeling of accomplishment as possible by allowing the player's choices to matter, to have real consequence in the game. Both good and bad. Many people play this game to experience what it feels like to have their individual choice matter. I cannot get behind the idea of removing that from the player, by any method or amount.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
The first time you do it, you have determined that the dice are not responsible for anything that happens in the campaign: everything that happens from the first fudge and onwards is dictated by the will of the DM.
If you fudge a roll to prevent a critical hit on a character, do you do that every time you roll a crit from them on? What happens if you don't, and you've led that to a character death?
Essentially, if you do it once, you've also done it for every single dice roll you make for the rest of the campaign, because you've decided that the numbers will be what you want them to be regardless of rolling any dice. You might roll an 11 for an attack roll and decide that it stays, but in every case you then roll at 11, you're deciding that it was an 11.
The game is then a DM railroad experience, since you've decided that any outcome you don't think is the preferred outcome is just ignored. No character can ever die without you explicitly deciding to kill them. We use dice specifically to prevent that situation.
The first time you do it, you have determined that the dice are not responsible for anything that happens in the campaign: everything that happens from that point and onwards is dictated by the will of the DM.
If you fudge a roll to prevent a critical hit on a character, do you do that every time you roll a crit from them on? What happens if you don't, and you've led that to a character death?
Essentially, if you do it once, you've also done it for every single dice roll you make for the rest of the campaign, because you've decided that the numbers will be what you want them to be regardless of rolling any dice. You might roll an 11 for an attack roll and decide that it stays, but in every case you then roll at 11, you're deciding that it was an 11.
The game is then a DM railroad experience, since you've decided that any outcome you don't think is the preferred outcome is just ignored. No character can ever die without you explicitly deciding to kill them. We use dice specifically to prevent that situation.
This is easily a 50/50 topic (as in the community is split), and I'd argue for it except to say that it is heavily situational. Example: in one of my campaigns, a fellow player rolled obnoxiously high stats to start the game at level 3 and kept rolling super high on certain key checks that were originally "scripted to fail". Months later, DM admitted to raising the DC or just flat-out saying the roll didn't succeed so he could balance the campaign with this player's stats. I mean, what's the difference in fudging rolls or raising the DC? Not much in my mind. And what players don't know won't hurt them. BUT! DMs abusing their power and railroading players I think is a failure on the DMs part to write a world that is able to absorb the chaos of the PCs at the table and keep moving along.
The first time you do it, you have determined that the dice are not responsible for anything that happens in the campaign: everything that happens from that point and onwards is dictated by the will of the DM.
If you fudge a roll to prevent a critical hit on a character, do you do that every time you roll a crit from them on? What happens if you don't, and you've led that to a character death?
Essentially, if you do it once, you've also done it for every single dice roll you make for the rest of the campaign, because you've decided that the numbers will be what you want them to be regardless of rolling any dice. You might roll an 11 for an attack roll and decide that it stays, but in every case you then roll at 11, you're deciding that it was an 11.
The game is then a DM railroad experience, since you've decided that any outcome you don't think is the preferred outcome is just ignored. No character can ever die without you explicitly deciding to kill them. We use dice specifically to prevent that situation.
This is easily a 50/50 topic (as in the community is split), and I'd argue for it except to say that it is heavily situational. Example: in one of my campaigns, a fellow player rolled obnoxiously high stats to start the game at level 3 and kept rolling super high on certain key checks that were originally "scripted to fail". Months later, DM admitted to raising the DC or just flat-out saying the roll didn't succeed so he could balance the campaign with this player's stats. I mean, what's the difference in fudging rolls or raising the DC? Not much in my mind. And what players don't know won't hurt them. BUT! DMs abusing their power and railroading players I think is a failure on the DMs part to write a world that is able to absorb the chaos of the PCs at the table and keep moving along.
I mean, yes dont get in the habit of regularly fudging dice rolls, but is it really so bad for a new DM and a new party to maybe not have a TPK due to luck? You can still make a lucky attack hard hitting, but instead it only knocks out 1 person instead of the whole party.
Oh, no, I completely agree. I know DMs like to punish PCs for character growth, story development, or a number of other reasons, but yeah... TPKs seem counter-productive to the whole experience unless it's like... the last big BB battle or something similar.
Anecdotally, One of my favorite one-shots as a PC was having a TPK halfway through, taking a break thinking the game was over, Dm calls us back to talk about the experience, then being summoned to another realm because "your work isn't done yet, adventurers" and gaining the favor of lesser deities to be sent back and fight the BB again. Such a roller coaster. But, afterwards we learned that the TPK was not intended, lol... So, the DM went with it and changed his plan on the fly to keep the momentum going.
Build a mini-sandbox area where the players start. Usually give them a small hamlet, with the capability of visiting one or two other villages and maybe a town. Think of what the problem is with area as a big bad, what they are planning on doing. Have an encounter maybe on the road to the town or have the players get attacked in town by something not quite right - something that foreshadows what's going on.
Have the town somewhat fleshed out in advance if you can, or at the least think of the shops you want the town to have (blacksmith, general goods, farrier/stable, carpenter, hobbler, temple, tavern or two with an inn). Think of who the leader of the town is and how do they related to the big bad, is he an ally, enemy, neutral, brave or foolish. You can go to Donjon.bin.sh as a town builder, they have shop and inn/tavern generators for you. You might want to have some of the towns characters thought out a bit and what their motivations are, most will not be involved, or maybe the town has been infiltrated. If the big bad is forming a cult, maybe the townsfolk will disappear and come back slightly altered in their towns, maybe a lot more friendly now for example - something similar to "Against the cult of the Reptile God". Naming can be difficult, use Fantasy Name Generator or just use the Fantasy Random Generator from donjon set to NPC's. Put in a town message board with a list of potential quests or services the players could use.
Decide if you want the players to do a bunch of mini-adventures to get to level 2 first or if you want them to go right into a dungeon first. I suggest reviewing some of the level 1 starter adventures from D&D's past as a baseline. Phandalin is rather well known at this point. Alternatives from older editions like can also work: The Sunless Citadel, Against the Cult of the Reptile God, In Search of Adventure or In Search fo the Unknown, The Keep on the Borderlands, The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, or The Village of Hommlet. If you want to run a full campaign, try 2nd Editions "A Night Below", that one is fun and will take the players from level 1 to 10+ and has above ground and underdark adventures.
These can be deployed when players want to go do something that you have nothing prepped for yet so you don't have to either railroad them away or try to making something up on the fly as a brand new DM. A combat and or another encounter can do a good job of filling a session and give you a week to create the path the party has chosen to go.
(I say random encounter but it doesn't have to be a random attack. You can have something up your sleeve in reserve s that is directly related to the plot or PC backstory)
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hi I'm about to DM my my first session can I haven some tips
Relax.
Enjoy yourself.
Don't be afraid to ask the players to hang on while you look up anything you aren't sure of.
Make rulings on the fly, allow the players to question them, be fair, but ultimately it's up to you.
If it sounds fun, go with it.
The rules are just guidelines. Abandon them whenever you see fit, except when doing so would make a player feel cheated.
Always roll dice in the open.
Make sure you have a dungeon ready!
doesn’t need to be big or fancy or super detailed, but have some sort of dungeon ready for the players. One huge mistake that a lot of DMs are making nowadays is that don’t actually do this, believe it or not lol. They think the game is “talking” and dragons with maybe one uninspiring fight at some point.
A thread where a new DM asking for tips about how to run their first game is not a place to cynically give your subjective opinion about what you perceive as "issues" in games run at tables that you don't play in, and will never play in.
You can have excellent combat encounters without ever stepping foot in a dungeon. I love to run my players through a dungeon, but sass posting like this is hardly helpful.
It's not yet been said, but a solid session 0 is highly recommended, where you can flesh out ANY details or mechanics there may be some issue with. It also allows you as a DM to let the players know, openly that you do NOT, in fact, have ALL the "right" answers just sitting there, so there will be times you make a call, then may change how that same situation works, if you determine you were wrong, or you think the call, in retrospect, was the wrong one.
Few folks have pointed out though, that the most important bit is to have fun. As mentioned, using the "Rule of Cool" sometimes makes the adventure more fun, so long as it isn't too overpowering, or underpowered, depending on the situation. Not bogging down on a weird situation is big, which is why the "wing it" suggestion is a good one. I would also note that any time I make a call on the fly, because digging up the exact, right answer would bog down the game, I tell the players as much and that this ruling MAY change in the futire. (I make a note, to review later and if I am changing it, I inform them at the start of the next session)
Good luck!
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
I've been a player for awhile and have DM'd some fun little one-shots, and I can agree with all of this. If you're planning some grand, months-long game, I would strongly recommend writing some sort of "script" first: outline the key events first, then connect the dots with dungeons, puzzles, and NPC interactions. Determine the loot the party will find, when they level up, and gets names for NPCs and places figured out.
However, if you're just having a quick one-shot, I'd use some adventure from the official books and add your own little twists and changes to it. Random encounter tables for sea or long land journeys can spice things up, break up some boring down time, and offer the chance for antics and loot. Through some wild magic in there, have a dragon swoop down and save the party for no reason if they're about to die, have them find a chest with 1,000 oops stones in there, just go crazy and keep it fun. I've fudged tons of damage rolls that would've wiped a party just to keep the momentum going. If you can imagine it, you can put it in your game.
I'm about to DM my first game using DND beyond and my own version of "Frozen Sick". The Encounter Builder is fantastic in determining encounter balancing. You can double this up with a map tool like roll20 to make it more digitally interactive, or simply just print out the maps that are available on DND Beyond already.
Hope this helps. Just have fun and let us know what happens!
Note that the encounter builder's recommendations for difficulty level work fairly well at levels 1-3 but don't work all that well after level 4. If the characters are level 5+ then anything short of Deadly is such a cake walk as to not be worth taking the time to roll initiative. For example, my party of 4 level 10 characters are supposed to have a Hard encounter against 3 x trolls. My level 10s would destroy that encounter in under 2 turns taking negligible, if any, damage. When they were level 9, a CR 9 Treant died in the first turn of combat without raising its arms, and a level 10 party is more than capable of taking on a CR22 Lich.
lol! Thank you for the advice. I ran a few encounters for myself and yeah.. it gets a little broken. This is just a quick game with some people visiting, so even if they wipe a group of knolls out in one round, it adds to the flavor of the game.
There has been a lot of good advice offered so I won’t reiterate it. But one piece of not so good advices needs to be addressed “Always roll dice in the open.”
Don’t roll your dice in the open for you first time, or your first 10 times. If after you have been DM/GMing for a while and decide that is how you want to operate that is fine(DM preference, and there are lots of arguments on both sides). Rolling the dice in the open completely removes 90% of your ability to actually run the mechanical side game as the DM/GM, and create a fantastic story for your players, which is your job. Instead you are just trusting fate, especially if you don’t have a lot of practices scaling encounters/ running a high power BB.
Example: The party faces off against BB, BB roles really good, does massive damage to the entire party, nothing you can do because everyone saw the dice results. A few rounds later BB does the same again, TPK. If you are rolling in the open you do not have any flexibility…. BB roles max damage on a high level AOE attack. If you rolled it behind the screen you can make some of those 6s, 1s and not TPK.
I personally always role behind the screen, and I only manipulate dice rolls in the players favor never against them.
For your first time DM/GMing roll behind the screen, it will help you keep the game moving in the right direction. latter if you feel you want to do it the other way give it a try.
thanks for all the advice :)
Teaching someone new to fudge their dice rolls so that they can achieve a desired outcome is pretty far from the greatest advice ever.
The dice roll is the random, objective arbiter of the game and needs be respected by the entire table, especially the DM. If the leader of the game, the DM, can't be trusted to be honest and transparent about dice rolls and their outcome, the players cannot be expected to do the same. Removing the outcome of the roll, no matter how slight it may seem, is the DM forcing the outcome of an encounter to suit their needs or wants. The concept of fudging dice rolls borders on railroading. Rolling those dice in the open prevents the question of whether or not the DM is being objective in their adjudications, it is an excercise in transparency. And yes, it does mean that the monsters that the DM has chosen might kill a PC or five. I don't think fair to blame the DM for killing a PC that the player put into a situation that it might die. That was the player's choice, their agency. Stand by it. Leave the roll up to fate, and the player choices up to the player. Allow for consequence to happen, both good and bad.
You cite being heavy-handed or inexperienced at encounter building as a reason to fudge rolls to prevent character death. Why is it only the DM that is expected to keep a PC alive? Regardless, not all things are accounted for when designing encounters. Specifically the players' actions. We can formulate a rough guess-timate about how a person *might* choose to act during a combat encounter, or even leading up to, but we cannot know the outcome of that encounter beforehand without having some otherworldly knowledge, or railroading.
In your post, you state that you only ever manipulate the dice rolls in your players' favor and never against them. I trust that you are telling the truth, but there is no real way to verify that statement. Everyone has to believe that you're being an honest broker. If your players were to put up a screen and roll dice behind it, would you allow it or would there be a discussion about transparency and trust? When playing online, do you allow physical dice or require that everyone use a digital roller with a public outcome? I might not suggest the "good for me, not for thee" approach.
I will agree that using a DM screen does have advantages in quick reference material and charts. Additionally, some people are more comfortable behind a physical barrier that helps shield them from the public audience they are speaking to. Much like being behind a lectern or podium when public speaking. These are reasons for someone to use a DM screen, not so that they might obfuscate results to alter outcomes.
Also, I have to push back at the concept that the DM is creating a story for the players. Novelists and journalists create stories for an audience. DMs create a structure for a story to unfold in, the players provide the story. A DM might narrate a story to the players, but the players choose the action, direction and detail that gets narrated. They effectively write the story for the DM to describe.
@ OP, regardless of your choice to use a DM screen or not, or your choice to fudge your dice rolls or not, your task is to provide challenges for your PCs to overcome. I would highly recommend preserving as much of the feeling of accomplishment as possible by allowing the player's choices to matter, to have real consequence in the game. Both good and bad. Many people play this game to experience what it feels like to have their individual choice matter. I cannot get behind the idea of removing that from the player, by any method or amount.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
The issue with fudging rolls is pretty clear:
The first time you do it, you have determined that the dice are not responsible for anything that happens in the campaign: everything that happens from the first fudge and onwards is dictated by the will of the DM.
If you fudge a roll to prevent a critical hit on a character, do you do that every time you roll a crit from them on? What happens if you don't, and you've led that to a character death?
Essentially, if you do it once, you've also done it for every single dice roll you make for the rest of the campaign, because you've decided that the numbers will be what you want them to be regardless of rolling any dice. You might roll an 11 for an attack roll and decide that it stays, but in every case you then roll at 11, you're deciding that it was an 11.
The game is then a DM railroad experience, since you've decided that any outcome you don't think is the preferred outcome is just ignored. No character can ever die without you explicitly deciding to kill them. We use dice specifically to prevent that situation.
This is always a good source of information Matthew Colville's Running the Game series.
This is easily a 50/50 topic (as in the community is split), and I'd argue for it except to say that it is heavily situational. Example: in one of my campaigns, a fellow player rolled obnoxiously high stats to start the game at level 3 and kept rolling super high on certain key checks that were originally "scripted to fail". Months later, DM admitted to raising the DC or just flat-out saying the roll didn't succeed so he could balance the campaign with this player's stats. I mean, what's the difference in fudging rolls or raising the DC? Not much in my mind. And what players don't know won't hurt them. BUT! DMs abusing their power and railroading players I think is a failure on the DMs part to write a world that is able to absorb the chaos of the PCs at the table and keep moving along.
I mean, yes dont get in the habit of regularly fudging dice rolls, but is it really so bad for a new DM and a new party to maybe not have a TPK due to luck? You can still make a lucky attack hard hitting, but instead it only knocks out 1 person instead of the whole party.
Oh, no, I completely agree. I know DMs like to punish PCs for character growth, story development, or a number of other reasons, but yeah... TPKs seem counter-productive to the whole experience unless it's like... the last big BB battle or something similar.
Anecdotally, One of my favorite one-shots as a PC was having a TPK halfway through, taking a break thinking the game was over, Dm calls us back to talk about the experience, then being summoned to another realm because "your work isn't done yet, adventurers" and gaining the favor of lesser deities to be sent back and fight the BB again. Such a roller coaster. But, afterwards we learned that the TPK was not intended, lol... So, the DM went with it and changed his plan on the fly to keep the momentum going.
thank you all so much
Build a mini-sandbox area where the players start. Usually give them a small hamlet, with the capability of visiting one or two other villages and maybe a town. Think of what the problem is with area as a big bad, what they are planning on doing. Have an encounter maybe on the road to the town or have the players get attacked in town by something not quite right - something that foreshadows what's going on.
Have the town somewhat fleshed out in advance if you can, or at the least think of the shops you want the town to have (blacksmith, general goods, farrier/stable, carpenter, hobbler, temple, tavern or two with an inn). Think of who the leader of the town is and how do they related to the big bad, is he an ally, enemy, neutral, brave or foolish. You can go to Donjon.bin.sh as a town builder, they have shop and inn/tavern generators for you. You might want to have some of the towns characters thought out a bit and what their motivations are, most will not be involved, or maybe the town has been infiltrated. If the big bad is forming a cult, maybe the townsfolk will disappear and come back slightly altered in their towns, maybe a lot more friendly now for example - something similar to "Against the cult of the Reptile God". Naming can be difficult, use Fantasy Name Generator or just use the Fantasy Random Generator from donjon set to NPC's. Put in a town message board with a list of potential quests or services the players could use.
Decide if you want the players to do a bunch of mini-adventures to get to level 2 first or if you want them to go right into a dungeon first. I suggest reviewing some of the level 1 starter adventures from D&D's past as a baseline. Phandalin is rather well known at this point. Alternatives from older editions like can also work: The Sunless Citadel, Against the Cult of the Reptile God, In Search of Adventure or In Search fo the Unknown, The Keep on the Borderlands, The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, or The Village of Hommlet. If you want to run a full campaign, try 2nd Editions "A Night Below", that one is fun and will take the players from level 1 to 10+ and has above ground and underdark adventures.
ok thank you
One thing to add:
Have a couple random encounters prepped.
These can be deployed when players want to go do something that you have nothing prepped for yet so you don't have to either railroad them away or try to making something up on the fly as a brand new DM. A combat and or another encounter can do a good job of filling a session and give you a week to create the path the party has chosen to go.
(I say random encounter but it doesn't have to be a random attack. You can have something up your sleeve in reserve s that is directly related to the plot or PC backstory)